Miraz Jordan

Next week’s Micro.Blog Challenge is about Artwork and drawings — our own or others. I don’t draw, and think instead I’ll do a post a day about TV Shows I enjoy — present or past. 📺

Actually just watched an ad (for Ecosa mattresses) all the way through, instead of skipping, because it was entertaining. Featured a woman who’s probably a famous actor.

My pal Rachel McAlpine, writer, podcaster and blogger, contributed this very interesting 17 minute video to the #M365May online conference: Old people and their computers in lockdown. Worth noting how personal blogs have helped lots of older people feel connected.

We thought we spotted 3 sheep in the next door paddock but one. Unusual for a cow farm, but not unheard of. But they didn’t look right. Binoculars were no help. I grabbed my camera, zoomed and cropped (a lot). We think they’re young alpacas. 🦙

We watched Captain America: The First Avenger over 2 nights and it wasn’t bad. Great to spot Agent Carter too. We’ve got the free trial of Disney+, so may watch the sequels over the next few nights.

Everyone comments on how many rubber gloves wash up on Waikawa Beach. There's a strong suspicion amongst locals that the gloves and frequent large swathes of dead shellfish are connected with the clam dredge that comes through quite often.

The dredge is harvesting surf clams that live up to 10 metres deep in the sea bed. It uses a technique that pumps water into the seabed and then takes the shellfish on board where they are sorted and saved in water for later processing.

Sometimes the dredge comes so close to shore that it seems you could almost reach out and touch it. The official word is that the fishing boats can get as close to shore as they like, so long as they haven't exceeded their quota.

The whole thing causes consternation for many who live here. The locals are fiercely protective of this special environment. Some have pointed out that in the week or two after each visit of the dredge the shore becomes home to barnacled logs and shells that have obviously rested in the water for a very long time.

There is a lot of discomfort about the seafloor being massively disturbed in this way.

Less disturbingly, recreational fishing has little impact on the environment, though empty bait packets often feature among the beach rubbish.

In the first decade of the 1900s Waikawa Beach was famous in the area for its toheroa, pipi, fishing and whitebaiting. Unfortunately, the toheroa have long gone. Occasionally you'll see someone wading through the shallows, bucket in hand, loading up with fresh shellfish.

These days people put out Kontikis, often equipped with GPS, and send them thousands of metres away from shore to catch fish. Others take flounder nets to the river mouth and often come back with at least a few. Some hardy folks take kayaks or surfboards out and catch fish that way, while others grab the tractor and haul their 2-person craft down to the beach for a day's fishing.

In-season whitebaiting is always popular in the river, though most folks you speak to talk wistfully of earlier times when they'd catch large amounts. These days some count themselves lucky to get a single good feed.

Originally published in Ōtaki Today, May 2020, page 19.

I watched Batwoman, reluctantly, because of Ruby Rose. The show was too dark and gruesome for my taste. So I’m partly sad and partly relieved that Ruby Rose Is Done With Being Batwoman Now. I liked that Batwoman was a gorgeous lesbian hero. Didn’t care for the cruelty. Photo. 🌈

I’ve been part of only a very few Zoom calls and everyone else knows more than me about using Zoom. That’s why I’m reading Take Control of Zoom by Glenn Fleishman.

will take you from your current level of Zoom knowledge to full expertise through task-based, bite-sized chunks.

Last week I thought we had a frost. This morning we definitely did!

Dawn is on its way.

Tl;dr: the website Free Online OCR does a fantastic job extracting text from screenshots.

I really really dislike the service called Issuu. Many newspapers use it to publish online. I find it hard to read: zooming and scrolling are generally obnoxious. What's more, some publications make it impossible to copy text.

That problem struck today when I wanted to quote a couple of paragraphs in an item from the Ōtaki Mail for our local Waikawa Beach Ratepayers Association blog where a member had referred to a particular article. I ended up making a screenshot of the approx 200 words and apologising for not offering a text version. Totally inaccessible!

Then I went searching and turned up the website Free Online OCR which claims to get text out of images. What the heck, it was worth a try! Last time I tried OCR was more than a decade ago and the results were execrable.

Well, I was flabbergasted: the website rendered the text perfectly! It lost paragraph breaks and somehow an em dash went missing, but the text itself was perfect.

I noticed another article in the same paper was relevant to a discussion I'd been having with a neighbour the other day, so I tried the approach again. Make a screenshot, OCR the screenshot. This other 700+ word article was also rendered perfectly, a missed macron notwithstanding.

I'm so impressed!